Environment Bill

Lord Khan of Burnley Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, has spoken eloquently on this issue, both in Committee and during this stage of the Bill.

By failing to list soil health alongside air, water and biodiversity in the Bill, the Government have missed the opportunity to list the important aspect of monitoring soil health as a means of improving the environment. I hope that they can address this and show that they mean business by giving the important issue of soil health the attention it requires. We are all aware of the firm commitment to improved soil health in the new Agriculture Act, yet, to reverse the degradation of our soils and return them to a healthy state nationally, we need a long-term commitment to monitoring at both the farm and national level.

The simple truth is that, without a functioning monitoring programme, we are being kept in the dark over the state of our soils. A freedom of information request made by the Sustainable Soils Alliance revealed that, unlike for water and air, no single policy instrument exists to improve and protect them, and they are suffering as a result. As a BBC article states, the alliance discovered that

“just 0.41% of the cash invested in environmental monitoring goes on examining the soil”—

a point also made by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. The article goes on:

“That’s despite the fact that soils round the world—including in the UK—are said to be facing a crisis. The figures are startling: £60.5m goes to monitoring water quality, £7.65m to checking on air—but just £284,000 to auditing soil … Its director … told BBC News: ‘This figure is staggering—but not surprising. It reflects the widespread under-investment in soil health compared to air and water. We could be actually saving money—and the environment—by investing in soil monitoring because understanding soil would tell us a great deal about the health of our water and air too.’ … A report by the Commons Environment Audit Committee in 2016 warned that some of the UK’s most fertile fields were losing so much soil they could become unproductive within a generation … The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) told BBC News”—


this was in March last year—

“it was planning to design an indicator for healthy soils, and to establish a new national soil monitoring scheme. It says powers in the Agriculture Bill could be used to support the monitoring.”

What is the update on this? Currently, we see no evidence that Defra will commit to funding soil monitoring.

The noble Lord, Lord Deben, made the point that we just have not heard enough from Defra. My noble friend Lord Whitty said that there can be no time for excuses from Defra. What does the Minister plan to do to address the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and noble Lords across the House regarding the lack of references to soil health in the Bill, and to ensure that soil health is not left as an afterthought? I know that he will refer the House to the power in Clause 1 to give the Government the ability to

“set long-term targets in respect of any matter which relates to … the natural environment, or … people’s enjoyment of the natural environment.”

However, this power must be used actively to focus government action on environmental improvement in areas where the need is greatest.

We urge the Government to address the clear desire for stronger action on monitoring soil health through the target development process that the Bill will establish. This must be done holistically and transparently with early and effective stakeholder engagement. The Government should publish a timetable and plan for how they intend to progress targets. On current performance, they are failing soil health and, ultimately, the environment.

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this important debate, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, in particular, for tabling Amendment 2 on soil health. She made a compelling speech, as she did in a previous session, describing soil as an ecosystem in its own right: an ecosystem—or ecosystems—that we are plundering and destroying at an extraordinary rate of millions of tonnes every year.

It is often cited as an example of extraordinary human progress that we have managed to treble food production in the past 40 years, and that is true, but we have done so at the expense, undoubtedly, of many future generations. It is the case, as the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, pointed out, that many of the bread baskets of the world have been pretty rapidly converted into deserts. According to the latest data that I have seen, at least 500,000 small farmers in the world are currently having to deal with diminishing yields as a consequence of their impoverished soils. As a Minister in the FCDO with some responsibility for part of our ODA budget, this is something I am trying very hard to shift the focus towards, so that it is a problem that, I hope, the UK will be able to have a positive impact on.

Bringing this back to the domestic, I would like to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that we are working out now how to develop the appropriate means of measuring soil health. It is complicated but we are doing that work and its results could be used to inform a future soils target. However, as I outlined a number of times in Committee, long-term targets set under the framework of the Bill have to be capable of being objectively measured. If we commit in the Bill to setting a target by 2022, without the reliable metrics needed to set a target, and then measure its progress, we could be committing to doing something that ultimately we cannot deliver or might not even know whether we have delivered it. We therefore cannot commit to set a soil target in the Bill, but I can assure the noble Baroness of a number of things.

The first is that we are focusing our efforts already on developing a soil health measuring and monitoring scheme, which will produce a baseline assessment of soil health against which change can be measured. This, as I said, could inform a future long-term soil target. Secondly, we are currently identifying soil health metrics as the basis of a healthy soils indicator. This will complement a future soil health monitoring scheme by providing a straightforward measure—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, has made important and eloquent points in relation to light pollution throughout the passage of the Bill. Not only is this crucial for our insects and wildlife, but it is important that we can see the stars and better understand our place in the universe.

The 25-year plan for the environment states:

“We must ensure that noise and light pollution are managed effectively.”


However, no indication of how existing light pollution will be reduced has been proposed by the Government and, as the noble Lord, Lord Randall, indicated, the Environment Bill does not currently offer a suitable location for this form of pollution. The Minister needs to acknowledge and deal with this important area, as encouraged by the Government’s draft environmental principles, encompassing both precaution and prevention.

The briefing from Buglife, which, to be honest, the noble Lord might have authored himself, stipulated that light pollution is a real contamination of our environment. It affects not only human, animal and bird health but insect health—not only how they function but how they can act as pollinators. There are serious environmental consequences of light pollution.

In Committee, the Minister’s response did not acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of environmental and health damage, focusing narrowly on uncertainty about whether it has been proven that light pollution is a main driver of insect declines. I know we cannot vote on everything we care about, as we will never finish the Bill, but I use this opportunity to ask the Minister again what action the Government will take to reassure us and provide clarity on how they will reduce the impact of light pollution on nature and people’s enjoyment of it.

Existing UK law and regulations relating to light pollution do not provide sufficient guidance and are not strong enough to tackle its increasing impact. There are now several examples of countries that have introduced a national policy on light pollution, such as Germany, France, Mexico, South Korea, Croatia and Slovenia. Will the UK also produce a national plan intended to prevent, limit and specifically reduce light pollution, including a series of targets and a programme of monitoring?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this debate and particularly the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, for his Amendment 3.

As my noble friend campaigned for, the Bill requires the Government to set a legally binding target to halt the decline in species abundance by 2030, and we will talk more about that shortly. But to meet a species abundance target we will need to address the multiple interacting causes of nature’s decline, including light pollution. This does not mean that we need to or should set targets for each and every cause of nature’s decline. The species abundance target will drive the right mix of policies and actions. For light pollution, this includes measures such as planning system controls for street lighting improvements. Through the designation of the dark sky reserves that a number of noble Lords mentioned, we are also working to protect exceptional nocturnal environments that bring great natural, educational and cultural enjoyment to members of the public.

The noble Lord, Lord Randall, made a compelling case, as he did in Committee. I should start by saying that if I appear to play down the importance of light pollution, the seriousness of the issue or its impacts on a whole range of things, including biodiversity, that certainly was not my intention. I say that in response to the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Khan, as well. The noble Lord powerfully summarised the impacts of light pollution. He gave the example of insects in Germany, the turtle hatchlings which a number of us saw on that powerful Attenborough programme, and bats. I also saw the Buglife briefing, which was full of examples as to why this is such an important issue. I thank the noble Lord for bringing some of those recent papers to my attention. I can tell him that my officials are already in touch with many of the academics and researchers behind that work, as well as with the NGOs that have been cited by him and others. That work is happening.

Although I cannot accept the amendment, I can commit to the noble Lord that we will continue to take action both to minimise risks and to improve our understanding of the impact of light pollution. We will continue discussions with PHE—Public Health England—and DHSC, focusing on the impact of light pollution on human health and the best approaches with which to tackle it. I am also happy to relay the noble Lord’s points on the planning system and light pollution to ministerial counterparts in MHCLG, and I will ensure that his remarks both now and from a couple of months ago are conveyed to them.

It is probably worth noting that the National Planning Policy Framework includes consideration of the impact of light pollution from artificial light on local amenity, intrinsically dark landscapes and nature conservation, but I do not think anyone pretends that this is an issue that has historically received the attention that it should. I hope that, using his powerful words, I will be able to move things a bit in MHCLG. I am also happy to confirm that we will continue to work with our academic partners to keep emerging evidence under review, and the Government can set a target in secondary legislation if it is judged to be the best way to deliver long-term environmental outcomes and subject to this review.

I hope this has reassured noble Lords that the Government are taking serious action to act against light pollution and that they agree that these amendments are therefore not necessary. I hope this reassures noble Lords and I beg the noble Lord, Lord Randall, to withdraw his amendment.